In Sijekovac once stood a Serbian child
in a field of wheat and dirt
not far from the remnants of his home.
With him was another the next day,
and four more the next,
each of whom were brown and grey
from living in such fields.
By the week's end stood
eighteen Serbian children scattered
across the field of wheat and dirt
and soccer ***** and shoes
and shotgun shells
and crimson pools
and a father and his wife
heading to the next nearest village
for more.

Tonight,
I am adorned in baby blue lace.
I have boundaries nevertheless.

I favor not the days of months of
midsummer.
Then came the warmth of yours and of
solstice slumber
far and long enough to portray
a sort of ache I have ached
to confront like David.
•
Goliath, having finally fallen in fall
years ago
left standing merely a memory and
narrative which all have known
to harbor hardly any truth
nor any woe
but instead a poisoned crown of thorns
upon my head.
•
“Comatose”, cries Moses
along with his double wives
each of whom rinse my feet with blood
to merely watch them dry
and proclaim we’ve united.
•
“Go on, then, God”, they chant three times
and grasp my hands
and guide my eyes
into the warmth of yours and of
solstice slumber
far and long enough to decay
a sort of ache I have ached
to confront like David.

Tender is the morning
after every taxing night.
Tender is the morning
when I've deemed the sun polite.

You can be my marionette
says the old man
in the high Polazzo.
You can sway
and twirl
beneath my world
according to my needs.
I can only request
that the gold with which
you tie my limbs
be plucked vehemently.

The only gold I could afford
fell from the feeble ring finger of
majka stara.
Concealed from landless theives of
Slovenian camps,
its bent black beauty
stands a year away from
naturalization,
a year in which it means
the least.

Upon my thinning ring finger lives an onyx from Yugoslavia
which has lived there since my fleeting period of innocence
merely to deceive men of deceit
despite having gifted each of them
that same stillborn innocence
one day at a time.

Evening.
Below fifty degrees.
Leaves of the deciduous quickly fall,
shielding our view of the damp pavement;
Strays latch onto our shoes.
I attempt stepping on as many as I can -
a child easily amused.
I've forgotten those days
and concurrently wonder if they ever happened at all.
I grew as quick as the deciduous withers,
golden sap enduring through my veins
so that each day gains another fragment of me.
By winter, I'll be bare,
not certain of whether I'll see you in April.

We played musical chairs in forests,
learned of limbo and of wine,
discovered the appeal of cigarette upon cigarette,
sang songs of melancholic rhyme,
crept through night’s entirety
simply to linger through sun’s rise,
and realizing that our lives
purportedly go on,

 

parted.

Sundays, too, I thought of you,

particularly more than was healthy,
and when rain had kissed 
much of what I could not 

before noon. 

Those were the days of
witless,

wishful

thinking.